Brussels is to grant €300m to a pioneering carbon capture and storage project in the UK. According to a Financial Times report on April 16, the move comes as the EU seeks to regain its lead in a technology seen as crucial in the fight against climate change.
Officials said the White Rose CCS development in North Yorkshire had qualified for a grant under a scheme run by the European Commission to support renewable energy, grid integration and CCS projects. Europe pioneered CCS, which involves trapping carbon dioxide emissions from big industrial plants and piping them into deep rock formations for permanent storage. The technique is seen as a way to keep fossil-fuel powered plants in business while reducing their impact on the climate.
But the EU has fallen well behind the US and Canada in deploying the technology, partly due to its high cost, the eurozone crisis and the collapse in the price of CO2 in the EU’s carbon trading system. White Rose will be a new coal-fired power station providing electricity to more than 630,000 homes. About 90 per cent of the CO2 it emits will be captured and injected beneath the North Sea. It will be built by Capture Power, a consortium set up by French engineering group Alstom, UK power company Drax and BOC, an industrial gas supplier.
The UK government said it had provided a response to the commission on White Rose’s bid for the EU support scheme and was "awaiting the outcome of the process”. White Rose will be built next to Drax’s power station, near Selby, which is in the process of switching generation from coal to wood pellets.
Seven years ago, the UK government had announced a £1bn competition for CCS but has since made little progress in getting carbon capture schemes off the drawing board. It has awarded engineering and design contracts for two schemes – White Rose and Peterhead. The latter will involve installing CCS on SSE’s gas-fired power plant in Aberdeenshire, and transporting it 100km offshore for storage in a depleted natural gasfield under the North Sea.
Peterhead and White Rose were selected from a shortlist of four projects but will go ahead only if SSE and Drax take a final investment decision to proceed – and that is not expected until late next year. A report by the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and Trades Union Congress said widespread use of CCS would lead to a 15 per cent fall in the wholesale price of electricity and reduce household energy bills by £82 a year. The €300m grant will be awarded under an EU scheme known as NER300, which is designed to support innovative green energy projects and up to 12 CCS schemes.
